Valve offered to donate the name OpenVR if it was needed, but it was decided that since the API will have uses outside of VR (i.e. AR and IR) the more generic name was more appropriate.

What is IR that doesn't mean infrared?

Typo, meant MR, or mixed reality.

Any idea how that is different than AR? Or know any articles talking about the two.

It's an intentional branding effort undertaken by Magic Leap to associate 6DOF HMD AR with the term MR instead of AR - and thus associate only themselves with the term like "Kleenex." Typical propaganda effort. Apparently it worked because Wired picked up the term and others like Robert Scoble did as well. FWIW they failed previously by trying it with "Cinematic Reality," but nobody bit.

The theory is that the term Augmented Reality has too much associated baggage accumulated over the years from implementations that don't do realistic 6DOF.

So they are trying to say - approximately - that anything that doesn't have depth is AR and anything that does is MR.

Graeme Devine made this distinction by throwing shade at the iterations of mobile AR from previous generations that didn't have SLAM or any kind of tracking in a recent talk [1].

In reality MR was defined by Paul Milgram in 1994, and does well to describe the spectrum that encompasses Augmented Reality, Augmented Virtuality and Virtual Reality.

[1]https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-provides-updates-dice-su...

"IR" - for "input reality" - might be a sensible alternative term for this. VR and AR seem to focus on the display aspects, while the likes of Magic Leap are useful in the input aspects (which have their own sets of problems).

You are likely confusing Magic Leap with Leap Motion, which is specifically a tool to aid in Augmented Virtuality.

You're probably right. Whoops.

Ah, as I expected.

The only reference I've been able to find refers to IR as Immersive Reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UQK_ksU3kc http://www.horizonirs.com/vr-ar-ir-mr-vw-hmd-hud-whaaaat-2/

Though if AR features are added to the spec later "OpenXR" will seem less weird.

One of the ways I suggest people think about AR and VR is that -

One of the only significant differences is whether or not the skybox is filled in.

Broadly the technical requirements of the object tracking, 3d visuals and user interactions will be very very similar.

I suspect you'll end up writing applications with basically the same stack once we get there.

Useful applications across both VR and AR are more likely to be holographic in the sense that they are free standing in 3d space and designed to inhabit whatever 3d space WITH other applications.

The current VR "draw the whole world and totally control the ui" is this fields DOS era.

The desire for simplicity implicit in your statement is admirable. Unfortunately it is so simplistic that it ends up getting it wrong, especially if you don't specify which technology emulates which.

For example if you were to say: "To get idealized VR, take idealized AR and make the display opaque." that is a completely different technical claim than "To get to idealized AR, take idealized VR and make it see through." The reason being, the maximum limits of VR are lower than (or rather different from depending on your view) the maximum limits of AR.